[Video] 12,000 Sheets of Paper: 1 Awesome Video

The music video for Josh Ritter's "Love Is Making Its Way Back Home" was created with over 12,000 pieces of laser cut, construction paper. Directed by Erez Horovitz and conceptualized by Sam Cohen and Erez Horovitz, this video didn't utilized any effects in post production. Everything you see in the final video is purely a physical set of frame by frame photographs, of the paper cut outs, with no effects added.

Sam Cohen:"The video for “Love is Making It’s Way Back Home” was definitely the most labor intensive video we’ve been a part of – and with my background in stop-motion collage animation, and Erez (Horovitz) having worked on videos for OKGO, that’s kind of saying a lot. This is the first video to be officially released as a Prominent Figures production, which is the team Erez and I (Sam Cohen) formed after collaborating on a video for my own band, Yellowbirds. To tackle the technical demands of this process, we augmented the team with our resident graphics wiz, Sarah Graves (also my wife!), graphic designer Savannah Wolf, and the team at Boston’s Danger Awesome in Cambridge, MA, which included Marlie Pesek, Eric Giordano, Felipe Sanchez, and Ali Mohammed."

Sam Cohen:"The video was made in several stages: storyboarding, computer animation, converting the computer graphics frame by frame to paper cutouts, and photographing those roughly 12,000 cutouts into about four minutes of paper animation.
Josh Ritter had come to us with a loose narrative about driving through the night, and he wanted it to tie into the cover artwork which is a two-tone illustration. We started planning things out, keeping in mind that everything would be conveyed more-or-less as silhouettes. I wanted it to have the organic quality of those old Lotte Reiniger animations, but Erez saw the potential for it to start with that quality but evolve beyond that medium, so, once we had the story laid out, Erez spent over six weeks animating the entire video in After Effects, which gave him more control of perspective and perceived camera motion. We scoured books, magazines and the internet for the right images from which to create illustrations to use in the digital animation process, and during that time discovered the strata-cut technique which we used for the video’s ending. We were very inspired by Jen Stark and Ghost Robot’s strata-cut animations.
The video you see in the end is purely physical frame by frame animation. Everything you see is photographs of paper with no effects whatsoever. One of the most challenging parts of making the video was looking at the computer screen during the pre-animation phase in rigid black and white with no shadow or depth, and trying to visualize how it would later look and work as paper in 3D space. We had to determine ahead of time which images to cut as positives or negatives, how to anchor the cutouts to the paper frame that surrounds it so the pieces wouldn’t fall out, and a host of other problems."

From Kenn:
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I love the pictures of the responsible of the video sleeping in this kind of places, i think everybody in the visual creative business have been in this situations, greeting from Guatemala, great and amazing job!